From Petraeus to Hillary, public servants have been trying to manipulate the historical record in their favor.

Former CIA director David Petraeus plea-bargained to a misdemeanor count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material after having given classified government information to his one-time mistress, Paula Broadwell. How was Petraeus’s transgression uncovered? By exposure of a non-government e-mail account that he had set up to communicate with Broadwell free of CIA scrutiny.

After a series of Democratic scandals in the New York state legislature, Governor Andrew Cuomo is instituting a policy to have the e-mails of state employees automatically deleted after 90 days. Apparently, Cuomo did not want e-trails of politicians’ communications. Meanwhile, the former speaker of the New York state assembly, Sheldon Silver, faces charges of corruption and was forced by subpoena to turn over computer correspondence.

Under the Cuomo plan, a politician like Silver could delay and obfuscate for three months, and then safely assume that almost all of his communications had safely vanished — in a fashion that pre-e-mail politicians could never have imagined.

In December 2012, shortly after the re-election of Barack Obama, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson quietly stepped down without much public notice. Jackson, in apparent violation of the law, had been under federal investigation for fabricating a phony e-mail persona, “Richard Windsor.”

Jackson, using the Windsor persona, communicated in a way that allowed her to skirt federal record-keeping laws. But Jackson not only wished to exchange e-mail beneath the radar of the federal government that employed her, she also wanted to create an alias that might weigh in favorably on her own agency’s policies.

In surreal fashion, Jackson’s self-created Windsor also received an award from the EPA for meritorious service — perhaps the first case of a bureaucrat rewarding her own electronic alter ego.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now trying to explain away her own e-mail scandal. During her tenure, she may have broken federal laws by creating several personal e-mail accounts on her own private server.

Like Petraeus, Clinton ostensibly sought to avoid leaving an electronic trail that might have allowed the government to have full access to her correspondence, in her case while serving as secretary of state. Earlier, Clinton had issued a cable to State Department employees warning them not to use their personal e-mail accounts for national-security reasons — even though she herself did exactly that.

Clinton even went so far as to create her own private-domain server that in effect allowed her to adjudicate which of her government communications would eventually be deleted and which would be retained.

Consider the controversies that arose and contentious decisions that were made during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state: failed reset with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the pullout of all U.S. peacekeepers from Iraq and that country’s subsequent implosion, the estrangement from Israel, the killing of U.S. personnel in Benghazi and the scapegoating of an obscure video-maker. In theory, Clinton alone could have chosen to release official or unofficial communications that she found useful and to simply delete those she found problematic — messages that, most likely, only her staff knew existed.

Why, otherwise, would Clinton avoid all standard, required government e-mail accounts to create her own for official business — even with the risk that her shenanigans would be exposed as unsecure, unethical, and potentially unlawful?

In all of these e-mail scandals, the root of the problem is not, as is sometimes alleged, undue government intrusiveness into the private lives of federal officials. After all, the public deserves transparency — even with regard to bureaucrats’ private correspondence, at least while they are in office and communicating as public figures.

Public service is also voluntary. It is usually of a limited nature. And it requires accountability to the public.

The real problem is that our public servants are using their electronic correspondence to affect their public records — indeed, to massage history itself far more easily than had been done in the pre-computer age.

A CIA director who is entrusted with the nation’s secrets cannot use e-mail to facilitate secret lives in a way that would be difficult with just postage stamps and phone calls.

Jackson created a false identity that enhanced her own reputation in a way that would have been nearly impossible with a typewriter or pencil.

With the aid of high-tech correspondence, Clinton attempted to decide for herself which of her e-mails should be subject to oversight — in a manner difficult for prior secretaries of the pre-electronic age who were forced to leave a clumsy carbon paper trail.

E-mail speeds things up. It expands the power of communications and allows one to message far more people, far more often — and sometimes more stealthily.

Our public servants who get caught up in these electronic scandals are not victims of a new face of intrusive Big Brother. Instead, they are using technology to become a sort of Big Brother themselves.

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About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.

I’m beginning to think the most interesting e-mails on Ms. Clinton’s server were never sent to a government e-mail account.

We have seen with JournoList and the ClimateGate scandal that officials on the Left are quite happy to unofficially coordinate official actions for partisan gain. JournoList coordinated a leftward spin to the news. The ClimateGate e-mails showed coordination to the end of silencing Global Warming skeptics or deny them respectable venues for their critiques.

It follows then that Ms. Clinton’s mail server could be the off-the-record hub of her political organization and/or be a major node in a larger liberal network. Classified information could be distributed and decisions taken without government oversight or archiving the conversation.

People died at Benghazi as a direct result of Hillary Clinton’s incompetence, and now it has been revealed that she implemented an organized effort to hide the truth and circumvent transparency, which may also have been illegal. How did Hillary become Secretary of State? She had no foreign policy experience or credentials and appears to have landed this important and complex job merely as a consolation prize for losing the 2008 election. After achieving little during her brief tenure as a US senator, she quickly leap frogged over many more capable and qualified civil servants to become Secretary of State, presumably as part of her and Bill’s strategy to pad her resumé and give the veneer of presidential qualification for her next run. Having the XX chromosome and being another “first” to occupy the White House appears to be all this privileged hack has to offer.

Now that we know that Hillary Clinton conducted US foreign affairs through private email accounts via a private server in her home and that former EPA chief Lisa Jackson was also trying to avoid public accountability through using the email avatar Richard Windsor, the next question that should be answered is how many other Obama cabinet members are secretly operating outside of normal protocols? We know from past experience that Obama (or should I say Valerie Jarrett) has attempted to govern like a Roman consul by refusing to work with Congress, issuing dubious executive orders and illegally making recess appointments.

Let’s hope there isn’t a government within our democratically elected government implementing power free from accountability. We all know where that could lead.

Another example of the elites not being subject to the same ethical and moral standards that they demand we little people live by. It is amazing to me that people still vote for democrats. They are voting for bureaucrats and everybody hates bureaucrats! Yet they continue to vote them in time after time and are surprised when bureaucrats act like bureaucrats. Europe is not the answer for America. Idiots controlling our lives and telling us how to think and how to act is not the answer. God help us all.

Clinton’s latest ethical breach and clumsy, arrogant coverup are reminders of how morally unqualified she is to serve as President. Add that to her record of failing upwards through a series of more and more demanding positions: I hope she claims ill health and withdraws from the presidential race. We cannot afford another affirmative action president.

Clinton–having been involved in many scandals and having the protection of the presidential office has escaped scrutiny and punishment for many go to jail acts. Do we really need another paranoid criminal at the helm in 2017? would it not be the best thing that could happen to the U.S.A.–to have an honest and transparent presidency who has bared all records and not sealed up damning evidence of the unsuitability or the criminality or the communist and muslim background from whence he came.? In the next 2 years of the phone and pen phony and his executive orders–he will do what he set out to accomplish–That is to fundamentally transform the U.S.A. into the most backward and impoverished of lands. It is possible he could even dissolve the United States into some shariah compliant muslim land as he flies them in by the hundreds of thousands and supports them on a debt we can never repay. His goal is to bring us down and bankrupt sll American citizens as he opens our borders to every criminal and gang member he can recruit from South of our open borders. Why oh why must we tolerate this criminak in the whitehouse for another 2 years?

Stormin Norman Schwarzkoph did an excellent job of staying out of trouble. Thoughts of leadership stake soldiers’ lives and prestige in the hands of Savior Generals. He coordinated the campaign in a country deeply suspicious of foreigners; and maintained strategic secrecy during America’s first internationally televised war. He assured the American people that this war would not be another Vietnam. Duty, honor, and country are what make a general and leadership. Petraeus fail victim to a woman’s touch of deception. If she cut of all his hair in the process he would be Sampson no more….Schwarzkopf makes for a better subject of proper generalship than Petraeus…
jwc
Caruthers, Ca

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